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Peter, hello. Is there anything you’re feeling particularly mouthy about at the moment?
Well, I am getting older, so I’m getting more tempted to yell at kids to get off my lawn, or to complain about their rock-and-roll and hula hoops. I look forward to getting old, because I can then get away with being mouthier.

Let’s talk about your musical/sonic influences. Who are your biggest influences and why? Who were your early influences?
As for direct influences, the groups I first heard back in the 80’s such as Controlled Bleeding, Nurse With Wound, SPK, Cabaret Voltaire, Merzbow, and the like were obvious touchstones for me. Although I have always had an appreciation for cold distorted sounds it seems; one of my earliest memories I’ve had is being in my crib and hearing the sounds of motorcycles going by. Obviously I had no idea what a motorcycle was, but even then I was hearing how the pitch and frequency of the sound changed in the distance as the soundwaves traveled across the landscape. I was also captivated by the sound of thunder at an early age. It was a sound that terrified me as well as made me awed at its power. If I’m able to project even a fraction of that same feeling, then I feel that to be my success.

Where do you see your music/sound/creation heading?
I have been taking a bit of a break from recording anything new. My project as Bacillus is not dead, so it will pop up again; it’s just not apparent when that will be. But when I do, I may experiment with longer-form releases, something that is as gritty as before, but with more cold atmospheres. I will likely make sounds in the same way as I’ve done in the past; I don’t see myself using laptops and software to construct them. I still prefer the warmth, the messiness, and the hands-on experience of analog.

What’s in your home studio setup?
Everything I use is analog, even today. I use cheap/broken tape players, turntables, an array of pedal effects, a couple of cheap mixers, some homemade circuits, a variety of broken electronics that make sound, a mess of cables, an a workhorse of a boombox that I’ve had since the 1980s that has the delightful idiosyncrasy of being able to play two cassettes at once. My “studio” is basically a junk heap.

What’s your latest release?
Ha, “latest” is quite relative for me. My latest release was back in 2010. Of material I recorded in, I think, 2003 or so. Cipher Productions from Australia has put out Bacillus – “Anthracis” business-card CDR. Probably my briefest release for someone who is known for putting out albums that are 20 minutes or under. This time it’s four tracks in less than 6 minutes dealing with Anthrax (1. Inhalation of Weapons-Grade Spores in De-Staticized Aerosol Agent, 2. Encapsulated for Environmental Resistance, 3. Exotoxin Production Resulting in Hemorrhage and Edema, 4. High Level of Antiphagocytic Virulence Factor).

Can you describe your writing/working methods?
I don’t write so much as I construct/destroy. I take existing music sources and degrade them down to the point of nonrecognition. I scratch and sand down records. I find cassette tape flapping in the breeze on the side of roadways, and make loops from them. I take discarded/free cassettes and pull out the tape, crumple it, expose it to the elements, rub magnets on them, and so on, then spool them back in, sometimes recording over it. I pour glue over records, then peel them off and play the result. I splice segments of these raw sounds together, layer them, and run them through a varying bank of distortion, EQ filters, and such to get a dynamic wall of rough raw textural sound. I basically physically wrestle sounds down to submission.

What else made you decide to start making sounds of your own?
When I saw how simple it was to make a racket. The first time I hooked up a boombox to another cassette recorder and ran a tape (I forget which one. Maybe a Depeche Mode tape) through with all the levels set at maximum, and loved how the overloaded circuits turned a poppy synth sound into an angry spittle of rhythmic distortion. But I didn’t want to make noise for noise sake, as I saw very quickly how many other people were making a racket once I connected with the cassette scene. So I developed a concept that was parallel to the physical degradation of the sounds, one of disease breaking down the body, and focused on applying the ideas of disease, microbiology, pathology, pandemics, and so on to a narrative of sound as infections. That’s how Bacillus came into being.

BACILLUS live

Are you active in your local music scene?
Very much so, although not so much in the performance realm as I used to. I have played live as Bacillus, as well as under other names for other concepts (Natural Order, The Genitals), but I have been much more active as a nightclub DJ. I do so around town (in Seattle) under four different names, spinning four distinct styles: DJ Misanthropologist (noise, dark ambient, death-industrial, etc.), DJ Coldheart (old-school goth/industrial/coldwave/postpunk), DJ Dubonnet (1920-30s jazz/blues), and DJ Pelvis (1960s mod/garage/fuzz/funk/freakbeat). So I’ve been quite busy doing that and putting my extensive music collection to work.

Who would you like to collaborate with?
In a sense, I collaborate with different musicians every time I pick up one of their records or cassettes to alter. What I’ll probably do in the future is use recordings from musicians who have died from disease.

What other artists are you excited by?
I listen to a wide swath of music, and I’m always digging to find the obscure gems that time forgot. Every week I come away with something intriguing, whether it be rare soul, coldwave, vintage blues, old synth landscapes, or something that’s off-the-wall weird that makes me laugh to hear it. Lately a lot of rare minimal wave has been reissued, so I’ve been enjoying that resurgence in interest. There hasn’t been much “new” that I’m excited about; it all sounds too much like things I’ve heard in the past, and I prefer the original sounds more. I constantly find new sounds by digging around through past history, and I enjoy being able to share them by DJing, so much so that a friend commented that “it’s like having a music historian as a DJ.”

What’s next for you, musically/sonically/creatively speaking?
Music will always be a big part of my life, whether appreciating it or creating it. I can’t say what I’ll be creating any more than I can say what I’ll be listening to. But I’m excited to hear what comes next, whether it comes from me or someone else.

What did I forget to ask you?
“Have you checked your smoke alarm lately?” Yes. Yes I have.

John, thanks for answering a few questions. Let’s start with that old chestnut, influences. Who are your biggest musical influences and why?
If you mean who do I think I want to sound like, that depends on when the release came out. My style has changed a couple of times since I started in 1986.

My earliest experiences with electronic music were Tangerine Dream and Klaus Schulze. I was crazy about anything with synthesizers in it.Continue reading →

First of all, congratulations on your twenty-five year anniversary! Twenty-five years is a long time to be doing anything, and I think you’ve been consistent and principled in pursuing realizations of your ideas, and deserve a lot of credit for that. Considering the occasion, I think it’s probably appropriate to start with something retrospective. Why don’t you tell me about the beginnings of your work with sound, and your first experiences with noise music?

Thanks for the kind words, Chris. I never think about things like that too much, although it’s nice that you said them, coming from you it’s quite a compliment! I do sometimes enjoy telling people how long I’ve been following my creative compulsions, it has it’s own absurd impact.

Do you remember the first record you bought?
Very hard to say. For singles, it could have been PINBALL WIZARD by the Who, or CRIMSON AND CLOVER by Tommy James and the Shondells. Albums, it was probably GOD BLESS TINY TIM or the soundtrack to BONNIE AND CLYDE. And I’d still buy those records. Maybe not HAIR, though.

What bands from childhood have you NOT outgrown?
Probably the Beatles, Beach Boys, Captain Beefheart and Frank Zappa. Jimi Hendrix, the Who, and Black Sabbath are still great but I played them way too much. Jethro Tull and Deep Purple, I feel kind of silly now that I was SO into them.

Is there anything you’re feeling particularly mouthy about at the moment?
there is a music in the roosts, from deadly war teams of the wildlife colony tubes. Shy is the Wildlife of conflicting del fuegos and the orthodox Soul Nets of recent mystery. in a worship, Nations existed in dinosaur cries of hades.

Let’s talk about your musical influences. Who are your biggest influences and why? Who were your early musical influences?
PC: Mostly recordings of popular music of all genres dating back to…….
Where do you see your music heading?
Not sure, but it’s getting there.

Is there anything you’re feeling particularly mouthy about at the moment?
Lately I’m really obsessed with self-importance. I work in web development, and I seem to run into a lot of it in those circles, but it’s kind of everywhere in society these days. So many people try so hard to look like something that not only they’re not, but also that doesn’t even make sense to be. The “creative class” is this myth that messes with your head. People spend money they don’t have to try to look like a big wheel, when you’re really just like, making silly fun websites that only make money by selling advertising under the false pretense that anybody pays any fucking attention to it. There’s so much in our society and economy that’s just absurd right now but that people take totally seriously.